Stardate 20030914.1256

(Captain's log): George writes:

Why rebuild Baghdad (and other contaminated places)? Why not start a campaign for U.S. volunteers to import, house, and provide Iraqis with medical treatment for radiation poisoning and its after-effects? Haven't you seen http://traprockpeace.org/? Haven't you heard http://traprockpeace.org/audiorokke/RokkeAustralia.mp3?

I do hope you're kidding, but a glance at your site makes clear that you are not.

Baghdad is not contaminated with radiation. The only places in Iraq which are contaminated with radiation are the results of Saddam's nuclear research.

I haven't seen that site before. Now that I've looked at it, I'm less than impressed. I didn't see anything there I hadn't seen before in similar sites with similar political agendas. They were wrong, and he is too.

Perhaps part of why I wasn't impressed is because I have also seen this report from the World Health Organization which says that depleted uranium does not represent a significant radiation hazard. (Or indeed much of a hazard of any kind.)

And I have seen these sites, which actually talk about some of the science involved.

I know enough about nuclear physics to know that radioactivity is both a matter of degree and a matter of kind. Some kinds of radioactivity are incomparably more dangerous than other kinds, and some materials are far more radioactive than others. Some kinds of things which are radioactive can kill you in just a few seconds of unprotected exposure. Others represent no statistically significant risk even after years of exposure, and depleted uranium is one of them. A human body is more radioactive than an equal mass of depleted uranium because a human body contains carbon-14 and potassium-40, whereas U-238 has such a long half-life as to be almost non-radioactive.

Carbon-14 and potassium-40 are also beta sources, and beta radiation (fast electrons) is far more dangerous than alpha radiation (fast helium nuclei) which is what depleted uranium emits feebly. Alpha radiation is by far the least hazardous form of radiation emitted by anything. In order to protect yourself against energetic beta or gamma or fast neutrons, you need inches of lead or feet of concrete. But to protect yourself against energetic alpha, a piece of paper is more than sufficient. In fact, the layer of dead skin cells on the surface of your body is more than sufficient. (Alpha radiation can't even travel very far through air without serious attenuation.)

Given a choice, I'd rather spend a year next to a one-ton block of depleted uranium than to spend ten minutes near one gram of C-14 without shielding, because I know that the DU would represent no hazard whatever, whereas that C-14 could cause me serious harm.

I know that in some kinds of equipment, depleted uranium is incorporated as a radiation shield around critical components. I know that if the inside of my home was lined with DU foil, then my exposure to radiation would decrease because it would reduce my exposure to cosmic rays without contributing any significant radiation of its own.

I know that many of the reports claiming a huge increase in birth defects in Iraq after 1991 were lies, propaganda spread by Saddam or his agents or supporters. I also know that there was no such reported increase in Kuwait, even though that's where we expended most of the DU ammunition we used in 1991. Not much of it was used in Iraqi territory because that isn't where most of the combat took place.

I know that epidemiologically speaking, there's no significant geographic correlation between places where increases in birth defects have been confirmed in Iraq and places where we used DU in 1991. I also know that scientifically there's no way that DU can actually cause those kinds of birth defects, even if ingested in huge quantities. (Please note that the World Health Organization says so: "No reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans.")

However, chemical weapons (such as nerve gas and mustard) are extremely powerful mutagens in additional to being extraordinarily toxic, and those who are exposed to very low non-fatal levels of chemical weapons usually suffer myriad health problems from it later (sometimes for the rest of their lives), often including birth defects in later offspring. I know that there's a fairly close geographical correlation between places in Iraq with confirmed excess birth defects and the places where Saddam is known to have used chemical weapons. For instance, we used no DU at all in northern Iraq in 1991, but Saddam used chemical weapons several times there, and in those areas there has definitely been a rise in birth defects.

From an epidemiological standpoint, it makes far more sense to consider those birth defects to be the result of exposure to chemical weapons. There's a known mechanism by which they cause such effects, and excess birth defects are found where they was used. On the other hand, there has been no rise in birth defects in many areas where